


god made me in his image who the fuck made you

by buckybunnyteeth



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: (sort of), Canon Disabled Character, Dealing With Trauma, Gen, Loss of Powers, Mild Sexual Content, Physical Disability, Sad with a Happy Ending, trans!armando
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-11 23:44:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15327036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckybunnyteeth/pseuds/buckybunnyteeth
Summary: “Your hands didn’t make you a hero,” she says softly, “They didn’t contain your power. No midlevel meta could take your powers from you, no matter how hard they tried. Its written into your DNA, it’s in your veins.”“No,” he shakes his head, close to tears, “No, I-I can’t feel them, they’ve gone.”Set in a universe where Killer Frost did take Cisco's hands from him. And how she could never, never, make him powerless.





	god made me in his image who the fuck made you

**Author's Note:**

> This fic deals with Cisco struggling with the loss of his hands, he is angry and sad and feels powerless. He does find that losing his hands isn't the end of his life by the end of the fic, but if these themes trigger you its okay to nope out of this fic and I love you. 
> 
> tell me if I should tag anything else!

 

"Gods die with men who have conceived them. But the god-stuff roars eternally, like the sea, with too vast a sound to be heard."

\- D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent

 

 

The wooden crate creaks dangerously under him when Cisco slumps down on to it, and darkly he sort of hopes it gives way just so he can fall back onto the concrete floor, get a concussion, and not have to deal with any of this shit.

 

Something big is going down and as usual, the clusterfuck of the whole thing seems to be converging in Central City. Or rather above Central City on an ominous floating alien death fortress commanded by a Dark God or whatever he is. Cisco just knows he is scared out of his wits and perpetually trapped in a room with every superhero he knows, and they are always arguing.

 

And he can't do a god damned thing to help.

 

Barry and Oliver had led an attack against the invaders just two hours ago. A ship had landed outside the city limits and released a wave of foot soldiers with energy weapons. They were erecting a structure that, as far as they could tell, was emitting some kind of signal into space, past the ship to a planet way beyond the reach of the star labs satellite. The team didn't arrive in time to stop them turning the machine on, but they did manage to destroy their ship and detain the soldiers. The ones that survived. He's sort of glad be missed Mick Rory's flame-thrower antics this time around.

 

Cisco stayed behind with Felicity and Winn and Rip and the looming sense of angry resignation that he hasn't been able to shake since Killer-

 

He clenches his hands into fists and his metal fingers creak against the leather gloves. One of them stutters and doesn’t close all the way. He feels like crying. He can feel Iris watching him from her place across the warehouse floor standing next to Barry, but he doesn’t look up at her.

 

He can’t really look at either of them. If he does he’ll think about what it was like before, with them, in their bed and their apartments and on their minds. And he’ll think about wanting to touch them again and feel like throwing up. How could he possibly touch them now? How could he do that to them?

 

So, he just doesn’t look. Doesn’t. Can't. Both. Pick one.

 

Oliver and Barry are caught in a civilized discussion that would have been a shouting match two years ago, while the rest of the team go about tending to their wounds and gulp down as much food as they can before they have to go back out into the fray. Kara and her team are cautiously mingling, the Legends are messing with them, telling lies about time travel while team Arrow snickers behind their backs. Rip looks ten seconds away from a forced brain aneurysm while Booster-whoever-the frack-he-is tells an increasingly outlandish story to Wally and Jessie. Stein and Harry are congregating over near the whiteboards which are filling up with alarming amounts of equations, and everyone else is munching happily on the pizza Joe bought over.

 

Well almost everyone. No one has noticed her up in the rafters yet. Cisco can't look up at her either. Mostly because he doesn’t want to alert the whole room of armed superheroes to her presence. No one outside Team Flash needs to know about her.

 

Having all the teams here is overwhelming. He knows these people all to varying extents and trusts them on a sliding scale. He knows that when the fighting starts again they’ll all work together, but it’s the downtime between bouts with villains that scares him. So many people he only vaguely knows when they are in the middle of keeping a big secret.

 

He also can’t look at her because he knows she is looking at him, knows she is worried. And it twists him up inside.

 

And he can't look over at the med equipment in the corner without getting alarmingly angry and chokingly sad at the same time.

 

He may as well walk around with a fucking blindfold on at this rate.

 

A quick look around tells him that no one down here is looking at him anymore, so he bites off his glove, pulls a screwdriver out of the pocket of his cardigan and goes about fixing what’s left of himself.

 

Suddenly Stein bolts upright across the room shouting “Eureka!” followed quickly by Harry’s exasperated, “Yes, but you're forgetting-”

 

“What is it, Grey?” Jax asks from where he is relaxing with an arm thrown around Wally’s shoulders.

 

“We have concocted a way to bring down the transmitter the aliens erected.”

 

“Not a good enough excuse to use the word 'erected',” Rene mutters behind his pizza and Curtis chokes on his water. Dinah slaps him on the back while Stein glares.

 

“That’s not quite true,” Harry interrupts Stein before he can keep going, “We have come up with a theory that we have no way of testing at this point-”

 

“That’s not true either, _Harrison_ , I-”

 

“I'm telling you, _Martin_ , these people-”

 

“What’s your hypothesis professor?” Barry cuts in, all diplomacy and forced calm before the argument can escalate and lose them more time.

 

Stein shoots Harry a triumphant look and he just glares back.

 

“As I was saying, we have deduced that the structure is surrounded by a field of energy that is unlike anything we have ever encountered before on earth-”

 

“We've also deduced that there are fifty more of them around the rest of the planet.”

 

The room goes still. Cisco pauses the movement of his screwdriver. He feels her shift up in the rafters, the same way she used to shift just before a fight, way back when. When fighting ended in a split lip and a grudge with a new set of neighborhood boys. Fights don’t end like that these days.

 

“Yes,” Stein concedes, tilting his head, “But these machines are also emitting a particular kind of resonance that when reversed we believe-“

 

“-you believe,” Harry growls.

 

“-I believe that when the resonance is reversed the machines will be unable to cope, it appears they are designed mostly to ward off a physical attack, a vibrational attack may very well be enough to overload them and cause a chain reaction through every single one.”

 

Cisco feels his stomach drop. Iris shifts and opens her mouth to speak but Stein isn’t stopping for anyone.

 

“-so, if the rest of us band together to distract our foes for an adequate amount of time, Mr. Ramon your powers are based on vibration and resonance-”

 

“ _Martin_.” Sara snaps. Her eyes cut to Cisco, and Stein goes pale. Oh, he’d forgotten. Cisco wonders what it feels like, to have that luxury. 

 

The room goes quiet and everyone turns to look at Cisco. He feels a smile, one with malice and too many teeth, spread across his face. He turns the screwdriver and the screw creaks into place.

 

“Mr. Ramon,” Stein says softly, genuine remorse on his face, “Cisco I didn’t mean-”

 

Cisco loves Stein, so he bites back the snarl on his tongue.

 

“Don’t worry about it Professor,” Cisco says with a shrug of his shoulders as he slips his gloves back on as if he isn’t simmering with a rage that just won’t leave him these days, “But you’re going to need a new plan.”

 

Iris and Barry share a look.

 

“Well, I mean-”

 

“We could ask.”

 

“We could definitely ask, it’s just that-”

 

“Ask who and what?” Oliver asks with a frown.

 

“Oh well-”

 

Armando drops down from the ceiling before Barry can finish his sentence, hovering just above the concrete flood before gently stepping down to stand in the center of a group of very spooked superheroes.

 

Several things happen at once.

 

Winn startles, screams and hides behind Kara’s cape, Felicity and Curtis scuttle backward and basically everyone else who has powers, or a weapon raises them in Armando’s direction. Everyone except the members of team flash, Amaya, and Rip. Those last two surprise Cisco. 

 

“Stop! She’s one of us, she’s-” Iris shouts, jumping to stand at Armando’s back, but Wally is faster. He zips around the group, snatching away every weapon and knocking the powered people back a few steps. He drops the weapons on a workbench and stands next to Manda with a frown on his face.

 

“You ok?” he asks her softly.

 

“Thank you, Wally,” she replies, voice scratching from not speaking for a couple dozen hours, “I’m fine.”

 

Wally smiles and nods bashfully.

 

Across the room, Mick growls and Rip pushes him back down into his chair.

 

“Miss Ramon is no threat to us, Mr. Rory,” he hisses.

 

Manda looks over at the Englishman and they share a look Cisco can’t decipher. He nods at her and something in her shoulders relaxes and wow. Ok. Cisco is going to have to ask what the hell that was when the world isn’t being currently invaded.

 

“Um,” Barry stumbles, eyes flicking over everyone in the room to discern if they are still a threat to her, “Everyone this is Armando, Cisco’s sister … who I did not know was here.”

 

“Where my brother goes, I go.” Manda corrects him, not unkindly. Cisco knows she tries so hard to sound kind these days.

 

“Oh yeah,” Barry laughs, “Um, Armando this is everyone- the whole team basically- and everyone this is Armando.”

 

“Nice to meet you!” Kara chirps but Armando doesn’t look at her. She has her eyes locked firmly on Cisco.

 

“I didn’t know Cisco had a sister?” Jax says.

 

“It’s kind of a long story,” Wally sighs as he leans back into Jax’s side, “A long interdimensional horror story.”

 

“Oh no, she’s not an anachronism, is she?”

 

“No, Mr. Haywood she isn’t, and if she was I would hope you would show some more tack than that.”

 

Nate sticks his tongue out at Rip and Kara’s sister hides a smile unsuccessfully behind her hand.

 

Manda walks closer, hand running along the nearest workbench. She’s making noise deliberately, so concerned these days with startling people. Scaring people.

 

It’s been two months since Cisco got her back. A hole ripped in reality itself and Cindy’s family came to visit in a big, messy, way. And bought his dead sister back to him. It’s been a hard road to recovery, a road that they have barely driven down. Armando still thinks terrible things about herself, still goes quiet for days on end and still gets in to moods that threaten herself and others. And maybe those things will never change about her, Cisco doesn’t care. He’ll change for her as long as she doesn’t go away again.

 

Her hair is down but curling back, showing off her face and her scars. Today she’s wearing clothes Iris bought for her. A pair of sports leggings and a long sweater with thumb holes, over a hoodie, all cast in shades of black. She’s always cold, and that’s not something that that woman did to her. She’s always run cold ever since they were children. Cisco would press his warm palms to her face just to feel how cold she would get.

 

He clenches his hands now and the gears grind.

 

His sister bites her lip, hesitating over what she wants to say. That is something that that woman did to her. Made her fearful.

 

“I can do it,” She speaks softly but it reaches every ear in the room, “Your plan is easily done, professor.”

 

Stein straightens.

 

“You possess the same powers as Cisco did?”

 

“And then some,” Harry huffs. Barry cuts him a look and he turns away from the conversation back to the whiteboards.

 

“She does,” Iris answers for her, “But … Manda?”

 

Manda turns to look at Iris over her shoulder.

 

“Are you sure you’re up to this kind of thing?” Iris continues seriously, “You’ve only been back for a short while, I don’t want you to feel pressured to do anything that would affect your recovery.”

 

Manda’s face stays blank.

 

“Darkseid,” she says, her voice carrying a heavy edge to it, “You haven’t explained him?”

 

Across the room Rip sigh and stands up.

 

“Darkseid, cannot be killed by us,” he explains, voice weary, “He will continue his attacks on the planet until he eradicates everyone he perceives as a threat to his god-dom. He will not be persuaded. He will not give up. He will kill us all.”

 

The room was quiet before, but the quiet gets heavier now.

 

“He cannot be killed, but we can defeat him for a time,” Manda continues, her eyes flicking back to Rip, “Assuming he is the same here as he is on Earth 19.”

 

“Yes, conquering the universe and eliminating free will seems to be universally multiversal when it comes to him.”

 

“And you know this how?” Ray asks eyes squinted comically.

 

“Really not the time, Dr. Palmer.”

 

“But-”

 

Manda turns back to Iris.

 

“It needs to be done. I will do it.”

 

Iris holds her gaze for a long moment before nodding seriously.

 

“Okay. We’ll help you get ready and move out as soon as we are able,” she locks eyes with Barry, “We don’t have much time before the next attack.”

 

“Right.”

 

Cisco feels a cold chill run down his spine. They are sending his sister off to war.

 

He jumps up from his seat and strides over to his workbench, annoying strands of hair hitting him in the face as the movement dishevels his hair bun.

 

“Okay, alright- you’ll be needing goggles, gloves- I don’t have a suit for you, maybe you could squeeze into mine? The jacket won’t fit over your shoulders but maybe the rest will-”

 

“Cisco.”

 

“-and your scythe? Do you think you’ll need it? Someone will have to speed by the lab to get it for you- god why haven’t I made you a suit! of course you need a suit-”

 

A hand clasps his own and he goes still.

 

“You’re coming with me.”

 

“No,” he breathes, unable to look up at her, “No, I can’t.”

 

“Cisco.”

 

“I wouldn’t be any help!” he all but hisses at her.

 

“Cisco, you’re-”

 

“I’m broken,” he wrenches his hand out from under her, unbearably aware of how quiet the room has gotten, “I’m not Vibe anymore, Manda. He’s dead.”

 

“You’ll always be Vibe,” she says softly.

 

God. He feels so close to crying.

 

“No-”

 

“Cisco look at me.”

 

He bites his lip, but he does look up at his sister. Her face is soft, kind like it only is when she looks at him or Dante.

 

“Your hands didn’t make you a hero,” she says softly, “They didn’t contain your power. No midlevel meta could take your powers from you, no matter how hard they tried. Its written into your DNA, it’s in your veins.”

 

“No,” he shakes his head, close to tears, “No, I-I can’t feel them, they’ve gone.”

 

“You’re repressing them.”

 

He grits his teeth against the anger coursing through him.

  
“Why the hell would I do that?”

 

“Because you are afraid.”

 

“Afraid?” he hisses, snapping his head up to look her in the eyes, “I’m not fucking afraid, Manda, I don’t have any God. Damned. Hands.”

 

He hates himself for yelling at her, but he can’t seem to stop himself, the anger winning control of his body.

 

“You’ve always been repressing your powers,” she says with a small shake of her head, “For as long as you’ve had them probably. That’s why your eyes don’t change color like they should.”

 

“Cindy-”

 

“-her powers aren’t the same as ours. You know they aren’t.”

 

Cisco curls his hands- his fucking robot hands, around the workbench and clenches them until they creak dangerously.

 

“I can’t feel anything, Manda,” he admits in a low dangerous whisper, “It’s gone.”

 

Manda looks away from him for a moment before she looks back with wide, knowing eyes. She reaches forward and pries Cisco’s hands off the bench and holds them in her own.

 

“Cisco,” she says, voice as soft as her smile, “You are the Vibe protector of this earth. Your powers existed inside you long before the particle accelerator exploded, and they exist still. You are a nexus point, an interdimensional anomaly. You are woven into the fabric of this world, you are a son of this earth, the sea, the sky. You cannot lose what you are.”

 

The tears of anger, frustration and pure despair that have lingered for months threaten to spill over. This is the most his sister has spoken since she got back, and it rips through him like a knife.

 

“Mando, I-”

 

“And you know this to be true, deep inside your heart you know that now ice throwing low threat meta could take your power, your soul, from you,” She continues, “I wanted you to realise this on your own but Darkseid is too much for me and these people to face on our own. Please, _hermano_ , believe what your heart knows to be true, that you have always been and always will be.”

 

The tears break way, sliding slowly down his cheeks.

 

“I don’t know how,” he whispers.

 

Manda shakes her head. Just like she used to when Dante came home with a bad school report. Just like when one of Cisco’s inventions would explode. Like the answer is obvious.

 

_Shake yourself off, put out the fires and try again._

She drops his hands and steps back.

 

“Just feel,” she says, “Just take a breath and let yourself feel. The universe hums through you, you just need to remember how you’re meant to feel it.”

 

Cisco takes a shuddering breath.

 

He is-

 

He is afraid. So, so afraid. But I can’t tell is he is afraid that his sister is wrong … or that she’s right.

 

He looks away from his sister, searches through the crowd of confused looking Superheroes and finds Barry and Iris. As he watches they take each other’s hands, worried looks on their faces. Iris nods to him, a silent ‘I believe in you’.

 

Cisco lets out a shaky breath and closes his eyes.

 

He shuts out the world and lets a silence fill him. Let’s it pour in through his mouth, through his ears, through the fingertips he can’t feel through until it fills him up from toe to scalp. The silence quiets his racing thoughts, his anger filled veins and wraps around his bones.

 

He isn’t sure he believes in the soul in a religious way. He knows that energy cannot be created or destroyed, he knows that what he is made of came from stars and the elements that swirled together to create the earth.

 

That concept forms in his mind and he stretches for it, mentally swims towards it, imagining his atoms at the start of creation. The thought becomes stronger and stronger as he pushes towards it. Towards the iron and the magnesium, the mercury and calcium and carbon. The heat and the fire that rages on in stars and suns, the unending darkness of black holes, his pictures it all in his mind.

 

_93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames…_

Then, suddenly something clicks.

 

He feels himself gasp in a breath distantly like it’s a memory or a premonition, not something happening now.

 

Pure gold light surges behind his eyes, surges beyond and through him, purges his veins and eats the marrow from his bones, pain and pain relief in the same deliberation. Images pierce his iris’s like knives-

 

_-he’s five years old and playing with Dante on the front lawn, soccer ball flying past him as his abuela laughs from the front porch-_

_-running through the halls of a hospital, a beard on his face and a gun in his hands as he races towards a child’s cry, a female scream of pain following it into the dark night-_

_-gasping and clutching at the bedsheets, Iris kissing up his neck while Barry plasters himself against his back, moving his hips in that maddening way that drives him wild, and Iris is slipping her hand down a devilish smile in her face-_

_-Armando is wearing a floral dress while a red-headed woman wears a tux, and Dante is crying while he stands between them and is saying; Now you may kiss the-_

_-he’s holding two babies in his arms and pledging that he will love them for the rest of his life and beyond, Cindy at his side smiling at them softly while her hands shake-_

_-Barry is dead-_

_-Armando is holding Caitlin’s face up to her own as her scythe cleaves up through her ribs and blood bursts out of her mouth, deep dark red as she gasps her last breath-_

_-he is two and both his brothers are holding his hands as he crosses the street, they pull him up to swing between them and though the world rushes away under his feet, he has never felt safer in his life._

 

Cisco eyes flash open with a gasp. He feels his whole-body humming as he pants, the old familiar power waiting under his skin, behind his eyelids … in his fingertips. He flexes his animatronic hands and feels powerful.

 

“Woah,” someone says.

 

“Jesus Christ,” someone else curses.

 

Cisco looks up and sees that every piece of furniture, every object in the room has been pushed outward against the far walls of the Wearhouse.

 

He looks up at his sister.

 

There is a melancholy smile on her face.

 

“Gold,” she says.

 

Cisco grins at her.

 

The god stuff roars in him and he turns to the team.

 

“How about we show this Darkseid what happens when you mess earth, huh?”

 

Iris and Barry swoop him up into a hug, touching him for the first time in what feels like decades.

 

The team follows him out of the Wearhouse to a breach he opens with a kind of ease that he’s never had before, and his sister follows behind.

 

He has never felt more powerful in his life.

**Author's Note:**

> did you pick up on all of my shoehorned in references?
> 
> Welp, this isn't my best writing in my opinion but this fic has been sitting almost finished since the season before last of the flash so I decided to finish it and I do like it. I just don't believe that losing his hands would take away Cisco's amazing powers and I had to make a fic about it. Why is Darkseid the villain of the fic? past Sarah knows because I don't remember. Enjoy!


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